Monthly Archives: July 2018

The Cirsova Kickstarter is doing mediocre–there’s no other word for it. We’ve got less than 2 weeks left, but we still need to raise $2.5k more to fund. I set a $5k goal because I wanted to actually see if we could get sustainable support after establishing a successful track record of delivering a quality product and delivering it on time. Given the success of other anthologies and magazines at this level (sometimes even vastly exceeding it), it’s not outside the realm of possible.

But hey, at least our first volume lasted longer than Skelos (given it’s $15 retail price and the fact that it crapped out after 3 issues, that $125 lifetime subscription is not looking like such a hot investment).

I don’t think it’s unpossible for us to reach our $5K goal, but please understand this is a Xanatos Gambit–

Funds: I have enough money to take submissions for 2019, and I spend days entering fulfillment for 200ish subscribers.

Doesn’t Fund: I just upload everything the way I normally do; people have to buy Cirsova from Amazon. Even with the attrition from people who backed the kickstarter but don’t end up buying on Amazon right away, people who go ahead and buy anyway will boost the issues’ Amazon profiles with sales they’d otherwise never see. I won’t take submissions for 2019, so will have some extra time for my own writing. I’ll possibly be able to bankroll a Volume 2 on the tentative success of Illustrated Stark.

So, will there be a volume 2? Will it be out in 2019? Really, that’s going to be up to our fans and readers. Stark is happening. That’s my main focus for 2019. I’ve also spoken with a couple of our other contributors about possibly putting out anthologies of their work. That would be an interesting opportunity for us to branch out as a publisher, moving beyond just a periodical fiction anthology.

Anyway, if you DO want volume 2 to pick up right away in 2019, here is where you can throw your money.

Piles of bones. After 1 turn, whirlwind of bones, attacks as 6HD, 1d6. Protection from evil or turning both have effect.***

500 -1 swords, 1 +1 sword*

300 -1 short bows, 1 +1 bow*

* The -1 weapons aren’t cursed, just poor quality.

** The skeletons are the unnamed Least Lich’s “seed army”. He’s a lieutenant of Endymion the Ultralich, and if left alone after the seal has broken, he’ll eventually lead this army down into the valley and use his magic sword to amplify the curse and raise additional undead. Things dying on this dungeon level and returning as undead is part of the curse that the chapel/abbey was built to contain and not directly tied to the Least Lich himself.

***I handled this a bit differently in play. I came up with almost all dressings and secrets on the fly, so I had the handle to the secret door be a large key-crank hidden by one of the piles of bone. Also, after the initial whirlwind, touching the bones would activate the whirlwind again, and I had players roll dex to not touch bones.

“There is a truly great advantage offered to the Game Master when devising a
campaign set on the Dying Earth. It is not highly detailed. There is no strict timeline laid
down. All that has happened before is not “recorded”, nor is there an accurate gazetteer
of for the world. What magic operates? Nobody can say or guess, because in the long
eons of the Dying Earth’s history, likely every form possible was discovered, used, and
then forgotten…almost. That means that all that’s necessary is to have the game in hand,
the books that Jack Vance wrote about the world, to create a really compelling campaign
environment. Using the creative base of the author, the GM’s own imagination cannot
fail but to rise to the occasion.” – Gary Gygax, Jack Vance & the D&D Game

I’ve been saying for ages now, all you need to run a game is a good short story and some stat blocks.

My players finally wrapped on the B/X Deathcrypt game I was running. We ended up with only 3 players on Friday, but since we needed to bring the game to a close for various reasons, I let them brute force the ending a bit with some extra hirelings.

The Deathcrypt was always meant to be run as a mini-campaign, just something to be run for a few weeks to a few months until our regular DM moves out of town at the end of the summer and the group most likely breaks up for good. Still, it ended up much higher casualty rate than any other games I’ve run.

I think one of the major reasons why PC death was so high in this game was the drop-in nature, as many of our players have had things going on during the summer and weren’t able to make every session. A few really bad plays combined with a few players taking their character sheets with them ended up sucking a lot of XP and treasure out of the adventure. While I wasn’t running a Monty Hall dungeon by any stretch, the players should’ve gotten plenty of XP and been well equipped. Except the following stuff happened:

One character managed to be the sole survivor of a particularly brutal session and walked away with an entire wing of the dungeon’s XP all for himself. And then he died in the next session because he didn’t wait for his 7K XP to get banked and converted to levels.

The player who took the +1/+3 vs undead sword only showed up for 2 of the 5 or 6 sessions this game ran for.

The player who had the magic user who could read magic and had a ton of scrolls and a +1 ring of protection DID make it back for the final session, but he’d taken his character with him and subsequently lost the binder in the intervening weeks.

The players with fighters who’d gotten the top-notch gear (a set of +1 plate and a +3 spear) last session were absent from this.

A few fragile, high value objects were smashed instead looted.

We ended up with more lost characters and equipment than just about any game we’ve run. Partly, I think, because we did not strictly enforce the “leave your character sheet at X’s house” policy that we normally employed. Also, the lady who generally quarter-masters for the group has been busy over the summer and only made 2 or 3 sessions of this game, so party loot was much more prone to getting lost.

There were three ways party could reach the final dungeon boss. A counter-clockwise spiral that took them past some pretty gnarly stuff and straight to the throne room, a secret shortcut through the well that would bypass some of the gnarliest stuff, and a clockwise spiral that put them at the back-door of the boss’s chamber.

They’d actually reached the back door in the previous session but decided to call it for the night there and go back to town instead of finishing the dungeon. Armed to the teeth and with almost all of the players there, it probably would’ve been a cakewalk.

Instead, two characters enter the chamber with the necromancer, while the other characters hung back on the far side of a room with a swirling bone trap for a couple rounds before following. The player had his characters in the room try to stall for time, feigning obeisance and bowing—it proved something of a mistake to genuflect while asking how they might serve an undead necromancer; one of them got a sword through the back and the other ran after a round or two of ineffective combat.

The characters who’d hung back initially ran back the way they’d came while the fighter ran the other way, hoping that at least some of the party would get away. The fighter did get to see some interesting stuff on his way out:

Ran through the room with some skeleton guards and a Thoul

Ran through a room with gem encrusted living statues that got a swipe at him

Hit a dead end with ghouls hanging out on a very nice funerary barge

Smashed a glowing orb of ESP that a bunch of zombies were connected to

Between having plenty of armor, undead being fairly slow, and finding the well-path, he actually managed to make it to the well and climb out to meet his friends who’d gone back the other way. Fortunately, he did not choose the path that would’ve had him running down the corridors of shrieking and grasping bones.

The party came back to the dungeon armed to the teeth with holy water, and though the necromancer had martialed some of his nearby forces to make a stand, only the Thoul was able to do any real damage to the party. The tanks tanked successfully (AC 2 and 1 are VERY hard for 1HD monsters to hit—something to think about), the necromancer got blinded with a light spell, and got a ton of holy water dumped on him.

Holy water may be kind of OP if you used it the way I allowed. I figure that throwing the vial of holy water across the room at a monster and hoping it hits is dumb, so I kind of assumed that what you do is unstop the vial and shake it on the monsters like they do in the exorcist movies. Yeah, you have to be in melee range with the undead, but it’s not hard to get something wet when you’re trying to shake water on it from 5 feet away. So, my least-lich went down like the wicked witch of the west with a bucket of water thrown on her.

Anyway, the players averted the regional crisis. The least-lich was part of one of many cells left by Endymion the Ultralich to make preparations for his eventual return. With a small undead army at his disposal, this minor lieutenant could’ve flooded the valley with undead and started a blight upon the land. Think of it like an ambitious air-drop operation—each cell has various objectives it needs to achieve, possibly covering for other, less successful cells, for the operation to succeed. This information is lined out in one of the items in the least-lich’s possession; had this been planned as an ongoing campaign, rather than a summer time killer, that would’ve been the springboard into a region adventure with wildernesses, lost towers, the hunts for ruins and powerful macguffins, etc.

Fun was had. Highest level character at the end was a level 3 Thief. If we’d tallied XP for the final session, the thief would’ve been level 4, at least one fighter would’ve been 2. [Other fighters who weren’t there last night but had been the previous session could’ve hit level 2 easily if they had been there].

Later this week, I’ll post the final level of the dungeon as it was run.

I originally wasn’t going to weigh in on the whole Critical Role thing in a blog post, because it was easier to just make fun of it on Twitter, but some conversations yesterday have me thinking this is worth a post.

First of all, if you’re not familiar with Critical Role, it is essentially people LARPing as tabletop gamers.

Don’t watch too long, it’ll make you want to tear your hair out.

What they’re doing is basically Soap Opera with D&D trappings, and they have a following of both gamers and people who are just tuning in for their stories. The questions of whether or not people who don’t actually play D&D but listen to shows like Critical Role are “part of the community” ruffled a lot of feathers recently.

The current debacle stems from a “beloved” Critical Role PC dying in the game. The DM/Showrunner claimed he had been getting tons of hate from fans about how awful it was that this character died. While I didn’t see any of these threats on twitter, where there was mostly an outpouring of “we lurve u”, someone did link me to a now deleted Tumblr post [gone before I could even archive it], so I suspect that a lot of it coming from the D&D Tumblr crowd.

D&D is a game. It is a game where characters CAN and DO die. People who are unable to accept that fact, or worse, blurf about “muh favorite LGBT fictional character was murdered by a cis het DM!” are garbage.

But there’s more at play than just Critical Role having a character die.

There are two major reasons why character death has become taboo in D&D.

The first is something that’s always an issue for new DMs and people that are new to the game: people are scared of letting characters die because they worry how it will reflect on them as a person and as a friend because they can’t gauge the seriousness of the emotional reaction it may elicit.

The second stems from mechanics that make character creation a tedious and laborious process; if it takes over an hour to create a new character, any PC death means that the game either stops for the group or for the player for an extended period of time while they create a new character. It becomes easier to go along to get along, fudging to keep characters alive, especially since D&D has shifted away from “game” and towards “story”. Characters dying derails or delays the “story”, and many people have a hard time accepting that (and expectations set by D&D-grotesque online soap operas don’t help).

These are both things that can be fixed, however.

The first PC death for a DM and a group is the hardest, but once it’s out of the way, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief after realizing that life, and the game, goes on. It’s cathartic. While I don’t advocate going out of your way to kill a PC as soon as possible, I do advocate letting the dice do their job. The sooner a new DM and their players realize “we’re playing a game, we’re not making a soap opera, and Marcie isn’t really going to hang herself because Black Leaf died”, and the sooner the new DM is no longer worrying about what their friends will think when the inevitable happens, the sooner the group can actually start enjoying D&D for what it is—a game of daring adventure.

Unfortunately, this is apparently a VERY controversial piece of advice.

It even got me attacked on grounds of “inclusivity”.

Popularity and Inclusivity are two things, and I’ll address both. Popularity quickly, because I think it’s less important.

D&D today is still popular, and the internet allows for fan content to be created and shared more easily, but it’s hardly the culturally significant phenomenon that it was. Cameos in TV shows written by and for Gen-Xers may inflate the significance a bit, but the number of people playing D&D is harder to figure. Sales for the 5e PHB only reached 800K in total in 2017, according to what sources I could find. And that’s not a complete game the way that TSR’s Basic line (which sold better than AD&D because it was in the toy sections at retailers) was, so it’s kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

Inclusivity is the more serious issue that I think needs to be addressed. (The notion that B/X is racist, however, is so ludicrous that it merits no response.)

I believe that inclusivity is more than just “muh representation”. It’s about accessibility. A game that is inclusive is a game that almost anyone can pick up and learn to play and can teach to others.

Is 5e accessible? To run a game of 5e, you need to buy about $90 worth of books. If you want to just be a player, you could get away with the Player handbook, which costs $30ish (apparently you can “rent” a copy for $20?!?), though everyone who knows the game knows that the best way to play and find people to play with is to be able to run the game yourself. But three thick-ass books that you’ve sunk nearly $100 into is a lot to digest. The size and cost alone may be daunting enough to discourage new players from entering the hobby.

Compare that to Holmes or Moldvay or Mentzer. You went to a toy store and for ~$5 you could get a box that had a short booklet with an easy to learn and well-presented set of rules for both players and DMs, an adventure that was written to teach players how to run a game and ultimately create their own campaign, and even the dice you needed to play.

So, which is more “inclusive”? The game that any kid could pick up with his allowance, that only cost a bit more than a couple of comic books, that he could read cover to cover in an hour and teach to his friends, or the game that costs as much as your utility bill with books so thick you could kill a man with them?

Next month at a local RPG con, I plan on running the Holmes Basic sample dungeon, Tower of Zenopus, and I intend to run it using Holmes Basic/Blueholme rules. I’ve run it in the past before using B/X, and one of the reasons why I want to run this at the con is that I’ve run it before for a library program and know I can run it in a 6 hour timeslot.

Now, because I am a very busy person with a day job, a weekly column, a gig moonlighting as a retro-game reviewer, and will be shipping out a book I’ve published this month, I was hoping to find some reliable char-gen out of the OSR community so I wouldn’t need to roll up 20 characters by hand. I mean, it wouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours, but still, I wouldn’t mind saving the time.

What I found in the character generators I came across was interesting… While they had some really good features, particularly equipment generation, they either made the mistake of assuming Holmes used B/X’s magic system or they paid lipservice to the INT % modifier but did not calculate a list of known spells. Typically, they would just list one random level one spell that the MU/Elf knew.

I think part of it boils down to early D&D weirdness; the early games don’t actually work the way that most of us assume they work. Whether it’s giving all Magic Users “Read Magic” “because you need it to learn spells” or having B/X characters learn new spells from scrolls and having a spellbook containing more spells than the character has levels, DMs do a lot of stuff that’s not in the book. I’ve done it, too, sometimes from ignorance, sometimes for convenience. But we tend to make a lot of assumptions on how things works and cobble something together from memory and experience of multiple different systems rather than go by the rules.

I’ve never run pure Holmes before. In fact, this summer’s Ultralich mini-campaign is the first time I’ve tried running pure B/X [usually I’ve done weird alternate magic rules that are slightly more AD&D-esque, because those have a more Vancian feel].

I want to get that weird “this is not like D&D you’ve ever played” experience from the game I’ll be running, so I’ll be adhering to the following: